Here's My Story, I Read A Few Magazines About Creating New Poultry Colours, And I Have Decided that I'm Gonna Have A Dab Hand At Trying! It'm Aiming For Red Pyle And Silver Duckwing Cochin Bantams, So I'm Probably Going To Start With Red Pyle And Duckwing OEGs Over Black Cochins, Because Of The Single Comb And Red Earlobes. So I Was Wondering if Anyone On BYC Has Anything To Say About My Breed Decisions, Different Breeds, Coulours, Etc. Thanks, James
Quite often d'uccles are used to introduce new cochin colors. You have to breed away from the type/shape and beard, but the foot feathering and correct comb are there.
Well, im not much on genetics or anything like that, but I created my strain of blue wyandotte bantams from a blue wheaten OEG male and a black wyandotte female, completly unpland. After roughly 5 years or more, I hatched some out this year with good type and decent color. From my expericen in that cross, I think you'll find getting the type back to be the hardest, cochins more or less have a simaler type to wyandottes, ware as OEG are just about the oposite in type. What I've lerned from some of my chicken friends is "get the color from the male, and the type from the female" I belive that's in Fred Jeffery's OEG book, but the same rule aplys to other breeds, or at least I dont see why it wouldn't. A method I've heard of is to breed the ofspring from the first cross back to the father, lets say... Silver Duckwing OEG Male X Black Cochin Female, breed the best type female ofspring back to the father or a diferent SD OEG male, and from that cluch, start choosing birds best typed to cochins. Now this is just what I've heard I dont know from experience on that way of breeding. On my blue wyandottes I had to do it the oposit way, using type from the male and color from the female, since I haven't hatched a blue wyandotte male until this year. That worked well for me but took me a few years to get them to look like wyandottes.
